Anyone with important data on their computer needs a good backup strategy. Hard drives fail and catastrophes do occur, so both on-site and off-site backups are important. Off-site backup used to be a real pain. One way is to store a tape or DVD backup in a safe deposit box, but keeping it up-to-date is tedious. Widespread high-speed internet connectivity has made online backup much more viable, and many companies have entered the online backup space in the last few years.
Requirements
Here are my requirements for online backup software:
I used JungleDisk (which uses Amazon S3 for storage) for several months, and it meets all requirements except for file size (limited to 5GB) and price. My backups keep growing, and it would cost over $35 per month (plus additional bandwidth fees) to store 250GB with JungleDisk. And their recent acquisition by Rackspace could be another negative (they provided great support as a small outfit, but whether that will continue remains to be seen).
Carbonite
Carbonite offers unlimited backup for $50 per year. Installation and setup of their service worked reasonably well. Unfortunately, I found their configuration too simplistic. It excludes several file types by default, which can be worked around, and each file larger than 4GB must be explicitly included in the backup, which is annoying and potentially dangerous. Their support department did respond after four days indicating that they plan to update at some point to automatically includes larger files and additional file extensions, but I decided it wasn’t worth waiting to see.
BackBlaze
BackBlaze is a newcomer in the online backup space and also appears to meet almost all requirements (unlimited storage for $5 per month), except that they also limit file sizes to 4GB and don’t have currently plans to expand that (but their support did respond to my questions).
CrashPlan
CrashPlan meets almost all the requirements, and they offer unique additional options of backing up to on-site computers and/or friends’ computers (instead of or in addition to online backup on their servers). Their online backup servers cost about $25 per month for 250GB of storage, but if a friend’s computer is used, there is no monthly fee (just a one-time purchase of the client software for $60). I tried it out and it worked well, but their price for online storage and the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to perform an initial local backup and then send the drive to a friend for incremental backup from that point (according to their support department, this only works on Mac and Linux) forced me to keep looking.
Mozy
The last service I tried, and the one I will be using because it meets all my requirements, is Mozy, which offers unlimited backup for $5 per month for personal use. I had already set up my parents and mother-in-law with their 2GB free plan, which has worked well. I contacted their support department with a few questions and was pleased to receive a prompt response and promising answers (Mozy supports unlimited file sizes and plans to support Linux in the future). It has worked flawlessly; I highly recommend it.
Source: kinook.com